How Much Is a Position 1 Ranking on Google Worth to You?

How much is a position 1 ranking on Google worth to your business? This is a question that should be asked by any website owner or manager - certainly by any website owner or manager that has in interest in SEO and the performance of his or her website. We could generically answer "a lot", but it is actually a question we can answer with much more certainty than that. You can in fact calculate the value (or a very good estimate) of the value to you of a position 1 ranking on Google. That is to say the value to your business of your website ranking at position 1 on the Google search results, for your relevant keywords.

We can calculate this value because quite simply Google tells us how many people search using any phrase we nominate for our geographical area of interest (i.e. where our target market is). From there we know what proportion of people who view a Google search results page click on the position 1 result, we can know (or certainly estimate) the ability of our website to convert visitors into leads and we (should) know the value of our sales and our own ability to convert a lead into a sale. So here's how it is done:

Get an estimate of number of people using the search term of interest.

That's easily done using the free Google keyword tool.

Type in your keyphrase
Tick the box for "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms".
Click on "Advanced filters and options", which expands out the options.
Select your location and languages.
Leave the rest of the options as they are for now.
Hit "search"
This will produce a set of results. Look for the phrase of interest from the list and you'll see over on the right under " local monthly searches" a number. This is the average number of searches each month (based on 12 months data) for our keyphrase in our target region. For example you might see an average of 880 searches per month for your chosen keyphrase. (Incidentally you'll also see other keyphrases related to yours with their average search data, so you can in fact select several phrases, total up the number of monthly searches and use that data.)

Now, several studies demonstrate that around 42% of searchers click on the first result of a Google result page. Thus of our 880 searchers per month we could expect potentially 370 to click on the first result and be taken through to our website. Of course this value will vary depending on how well the "snippet" in the Google search results for that website sells the click. But that's 370 visitors to the website from the position 1 spot on the Google search results, per month.

The average website converts 2-3% of visitors into leads, thus of our 370 visitors we expect 9 or so leads per month. That's phone calls, emails, form submissions etc. And if you understand your own ability to convert leads into sales then you can forecast your sales from here. If you have a 50% lead to sale conversion rate, then you can expect 4-5 sales per month. If your average sale is valued at $2000, then you can expect $8000 - $10000 worth of sales per month to be generated from that position 1 position on the Google search results for your phrase.

You can of course make this calculation for any phrase, and also use totals and averages as mentioned above to calculate the expected level of sales from a number of relevant keywords under consideration.

How can you use this?

If we use the data provided by Google, an understanding of your website's ability to convert (conversion rate), along with knowledge of your business then you can make informed decisions regarding your SEO plans. You can select which keyphrases you should focus on and estimate the value to your business of getting your website to position 1 on Google for those phrases. For some phrases it will be worth the expense or effort of optimising your website for them, and for some it won't. If you factor into your forecasts the cost of doing SEO work yourself or hiring a professional then you can determine if that investment will generate a positive return, and over what period of time.

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